


Like dead walls or vaulted graves

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Gen, Gothic Melodrama, Major character death - Freeform, Ominous Pianos, Sibling Incest (canonical)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 00:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5519504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edith Cushing begins her life as a widow and a writer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like dead walls or vaulted graves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Liviania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liviania/gifts).



> I saw your prompt on the pinch-hit list weeks ago and though I wasn't quick enough to snap it up, I saved it knowing I wanted to write a treat for it. Although I'd hoped to incorporate material from the _Crimson Peak_ art book, I wasn't able to get hold of it in time, so this is based entirely on the film alone. Title comes from John Webster, _The Duchess of Malfi_ , Act V, Scene V: "We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, / That, ruin'd, yield no echo" (116-17). Thanks so much to G. and G. for beta-reading.

_In my dreams, I still walk the corridors of Allerdale Hall. I can remember every detail, from the cracked stained-glass in the windows to the pointed arches edged with jagged teeth like the maw of some great monster. For it was a monster, that house; a monster that consumed all who passed through its doors._

_But I, Edith Cushing, survived._

 

***

 

"I thought you were going to use a pen name," said Alan, placing one hesitant hand on her shoulder. Edith reached up and squeezed it briefly. "Aren't you?"

 

"Even if I do, Alan, it doesn't matter. The story's been in all the papers from London to San Francisco." It had been awful during those first few weeks. Everywhere she turned were grainy photographs of Thomas and Lucille alongside increasingly outlandish descriptions of their many crimes. Sometimes there were photos of the house as well, but none of the papers seemed to realise just how important it was.

 

It was part of why she insisted on writing the book.

 

Lucille had only burnt half of her first manuscript, but when Edith looked at it after returning to New York, she set it aside without finishing it. _I knew nothing when I wrote this_. Thomas had been right to dismiss it so cruelly, even if her father had put him up to it.

 

So she took up her pen--the gold-chased pen Father had given her, the pen she'd used to stab Lucille Sharpe, though it missed her black, murderous heart--and started again upon blank sheets of foolscap.

 

_Crimson Peak_.

 

She hadn't returned to the mouldering wreck of a house since she led Alan through the gates, both of them bloodied and broken in a hundred different ways. She had sent Mr Ferguson back, however, to retrieve several items she carefully specified. As Lady Sharpe, after all, Allerdale Hall technically belonged to her now. The Sharpes' lawyer, a pale, gaunt man named Thurlby in Carlisle, had presented the relevant documents to her in an ancient casket emblazoned with the Sharpe coat of arms. Edith hadn't even looked at them. When she travelled back to New York, they'd come with her at the bottom of a crate containing a box of wax cylinders, a gramophone, three envelopes filled with photographs, and the small scale model of Thomas' mining apparatus that he had brought with him when they first met another lifetime ago.

 

Though some part of her longed for it, she did not look back.

 

Not yet.

 

***

 

_The house fed on the misery of its inhabitants. Ten generations of Sharpes had lived and died there, each leaving some painful remnant within its walls. And as each generation passed, the red clay that had once made the Sharpe family fortune bubbled up from beneath the earth like puddles of old blood, a stark reminder that the past could not--could never--be outrun._

_Of those ten generations, I only knew the last. I had heard tell of the Lady Beatrice and seen her portrait in the house's great library, with her skeletal face and cold, cruel eyes. She had given those eyes to her daughter Lucille, but they shared little else. Certainly not love or affection. That, Lucille had only shared with one person, the brother she regarded as her other self. For whom she had taken punishment after punishment. For whom she had killed first her mother, and then so many others, one by one, each a sacrifice to a love she herself confessed to be monstrous._

_When I knew her, Lucille had the perfectly carved beauty of an ice sculpture, chilling and brittle, and she only ever seemed to thaw even a little when she played the pianoforte. Then, some strange force would rise within her, flowing through her fingers into the keys with a passion I had never heard wrought upon an instrument before._

_I only ever saw it one other time, and that moment of horror is forever branded on my mind._

 

***

 

Before she left England, Edith gave orders for Allerdale Hall to be torn down, brick by brick. The land itself and the stores of clay beneath were worth more than the rotting edifice. The furnishings and moveables went up for auction, netting only a scant profit, as they had been damaged by decades of neglect.

 

Sir James Sharpe's library, Edith kept for herself, the books packed up and delivered by steamship back to America. The pianoforte, despite several interested buyers, was destroyed. There was too much of Lucille still trapped within those keys, and she did not wish Lucille upon anyone.

 

Rather than sending Ferguson to do her sleuthing for her, Edith travelled with Alan first to Edinburgh, then to London, and finally to Milan, to deliver in person the news of Thomas and Lucille's perfidy to the families of the women they had murdered.

 

***

 

_Pamela Upton was the first. Her father worked for Lloyd's Bank in London, but while we shared some things in common--a wealthy parent, a reputation for spinsterhood--compared to her, I was lucky, for he was a cold, unyielding man who regretted the loss of his funds more than that of his daughter. My father was dear to me and I to him, and it was only when he tried to protect me that he was murdered in cold blood. Mr Upton and his late wife had attended their daughter's wedding to Sir Thomas Sharpe and, a year and a half later, he was a pallbearer at her funeral, never suspecting that his son-in-law had hastened the frail Pamela to her grave. Of my three predecessors, she is the only one for whom I have a voice, captured during her brief marriage on a series of wax gramophone cylinders._

_Margaret McDermott of Edinburgh was the second unfortunate, married to Sir Thomas in 1893, a somewhat respectable five years after the death of his first wife. She only survived four months in Allerdale Hall, dying in the dark depths of a Cumbrian winter, her life drained away by greed and malice_.

 

***

 

"I confess," said Alan as the French countryside whipped past them on the train, "this wasn't how I imagined showing you Europe."

 

Edith gave him a reassuring smile. "We'll come back later under better circumstances. I promise." In her lap, wrapped in a blanket, Enola Sciotti's dog glanced up at her, tongue hanging quizzically out of his mouth. Edith still hadn't come up with a name for him, for he was surely old enough that he wouldn't have responded to it anyway. She'd found him in the foyer of Allerdale Hall with a broken leg--Lucille, she knew, had intended to kill him but must have been distracted. Now he wouldn't leave Edith's side.

 

She'd been stubborn in her insistence on speaking to the families in person. Mrs Fiona McDermott had broken down in sobs on hearing that her daughter Margaret had not died from pneumonia as she'd been told, but from cup after cup of poisoned tea. She demanded to know where Margaret was buried, but Edith did not know the answer. Somewhere beneath Allerdale Hall, she suspected. Only Pamela Upton had had a proper funeral.

 

Edith had ordered Thurlby to make an accounting of all the monies Thomas and Lucille had stolen from each of the unfortunate women he'd married with the intention of paying it back with the proceeds from the estate sale and--with luck--the newly operational clay mines where the house had once stood.

 

After all, Thomas' machine _did_ work. He simply hadn't had the chance to take advantage of it before Lucille murdered him, too.

 

Mr Edward Upton had listened in chilly silence to her recitation and accepted the signed letter of credit Edith offered him. It was disappointing, but not a surprise, given what Edith had learnt about him before meeting him. He would count every penny she sent him as the price for his daughter's death, but for Pamela he would shed no tears.

 

"I miss Father so much," she said after several moments. "I think he'd approve of what I'm doing now."

 

"Of course he would," said Alan. "He'd approve of nearly anything you did."

 

"Except for marrying Thomas." Tears pricked at her eyes. "I can't forgive myself for that. If I hadn't been so foolish, he'd still be alive..."

 

"Oh, Edith, no." Alan slipped one arm around her. "You mustn't blame yourself. Your father was murdered, cruelly murdered."

 

"But Lucille would never have done it if I hadn't fallen in love with Thomas."

 

"No. But if it hadn't been you, it would have been my sister." It was the first time Edith had even considered that, and she saw the darkness pass across Alan's face. "I suspected he was a fortune hunter, but Mother didn't care. She wanted a title for Eunice, just like Miss Vanderbilt."

 

"Oh, Alan, I'm so sorry."

 

"Don't be. Eunice will find a better husband, and perhaps Mother will learn to beware of charming young aristocrats who sound too good to be true." At the acid in his voice, Edith couldn't help but wince. "I only wish we all hadn't had to learn it this way."

 

Edith leant her head on his shoulder and turned back to the window. They had entered the mountains now, marking the beginning of their journey from France into Italy. In spite of their dark errand, the growing distance from Allerdale Hall allowed the weight on her heart to lift just a little.

 

***

 

_For Thomas Sharpe's third unwitting bride, he and his sister needed to range further afield. Though nobody yet suspected the Sharpes' darker intentions, his lack of funds and the wreckage of Allerdale Hall had become well known to London and Edinburgh society. So they crossed the Channel in hopes of better fortune._

_Paris was the first stop, the city of light and decadence, but the sharp-eyed French matrons saw through his charms and kept their daughters on a firm leash. Then Lyons, where he nearly snared the only niece of a silk magnate. Sadly for him--though fortunately for her--she slipped through his fingers at the last possible moment when her father married her to an Austrian colonel with impeccable credentials and a vast inheritance in the Tyrol._

_They left Lyons in a hurry not because of Thomas, but because Lucille had caught the eye of an older gentleman with a taste for beautiful musicians. She could have married, could have made a new life for herself, but the darkness and secrets that bound her to Thomas held too tightly._

_So they ran once more. The train they caught happened to be the one to Milan_.

 

***

 

Contessa Ornella Sciotti lived in a beautifully furnished house a stone's throw from the famous La Scala. Edith had taken the address from the letter that had been mistakenly handed to her at the post office on an evening she had since relived so many times in her dreams.

 

That letter she held out now to the elderly lady seated by the window. "I'm so very sorry, Contessa," she said. Beside her, a man she'd found at the bank translated her words into Italian. "I'm afraid your daughter Enola is dead."

 

The lady burst into a torrent of frantic Italian that the translator rendered after several moments. "She wants to know who you are and how you know this. Also where is Tomasso and _la bella Lucia_. Why do they not bring her this news?"

 

Edith's tongue froze. It was Alan who managed to answer the question. "I'm afraid they're also dead, ma'am. There was...there were a lot of things you may not have known about them."

 

The ensuing explanations took the better part of two hours, interspersed with the Contessa's increasingly panicked questions. _How do you know this? Who are you? Did you know my Enola too?_ Edith answered them as calmly as she could, though as she did so she couldn't help but imagine what her father's face might have looked like if he had lived to see her become the next dead Lady Sharpe. _That might have killed him even if Lucille had not_. She could not be glad that he was dead, but at least he had been spared that heartbreak.

 

To distract her, Alan found them seats for that evening's performance of _La Traviata_. The soprano was a glorious young woman with hair the colour of candle flames and a voice that sent chills down Edith's spine, and for those three hours at least, she forgot everything else and sobbed with the rest of the audience as Violetta died in the arms of her beloved Alfredo.

 

There was something comforting in the fact that she _could_ forget.

 

***

 

_Enola Sciotti might have survived being the third wife of Sir Thomas Sharpe. She was stronger than the others, cleverer, with a family who cared for her and could have set her free if she'd asked._

_That was before she discovered the darkest secret yet. A baby girl, hidden in the attic nursery, with dark hair and pale eyes, and so, so weak. The child wasn't hers but Lucille's, born before her time and, as Lucille herself confessed, born wrong._

_Finding her had doomed Enola. I found out later that Lucille had pushed her down the stairs--no slow death by poison, but a quick, panicked demise, hushed up so tightly that even Enola's family still believed her alive and well. Lucille had written them letters, counterfeiting Enola's handwriting and weaving sweet, innocent stories that I scarcely believed when I read them._

 

***

 

It was on the day the steamship left Cherbourg bound for New York that Edith made her discovery. She'd been feeling ill for several weeks now, but had assumed that it was travel and strange food. Alan, however, had withdrawn into himself once she mentioned it to him, and only when the ship's doctor gave her the news did she realise why.

 

"You're going to have a child, Lady Sharpe," he said, both of his hands holding one of hers. "You're at least two months gone by my guess."

 

"Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded of Alan later. "You must have known."

 

"I suspected, but I didn't want to believe it. Can you blame me, Edith?"

 

She couldn't. Still, turning on her heel, she left him and slammed the door separating their cabins behind her. _We had only one night together. How could this be?_

 

She was going to bear the child of a murderer. A murderer who had spent years in love with his own sister, who had got _her_ with child once before. But she had been different, or so Thomas and Lucille both claimed. It was why Lucille hated her so, why Thomas had refused to let her sign over the last of her fortune to him. He'd told her he loved her--indeed, they were amongst the last words he'd spoken to her.

 

There were doctors who could rid women of unwanted children. Edith wasn't supposed to know, but she'd heard the maids whispering, had heard rumours at school about girls who got in trouble but still managed to marry well. And they were discreet.  _Nobody would need to know_. Alan would, but whatever unease he had about the process might disappear with the knowledge that a murderer's child would not live, damaged and dangerous, in the world thanks to her. But when Edith closed her eyes, she saw the tiny ghost she'd glimpsed with the shape she now recognised as Enola Sciotti.  _If I end this pregnancy, will my child haunt me?_ She had run so far from Allerdale Hall's ghosts--could she knowingly create another now?

 

She had plenty of money. Between the remainder of her inheritance and whatever she made from the newly opened clay mines, she had no need to marry again. Widows raised children without husbands all the time. And hadn't she wanted to be a widow all along?  _I'd rather be Mary Shelley_. Had she ever been so naïve? Mary Shelley had lost a child of her own, she knew, and it had marked her irrevocably.

 

_I did want to be a widow, until I met Thomas_. But it hadn't been real, she reminded herself. Nothing about Thomas had been real...except, apparently, this. A little boy or girl who could grow up without the shadow of Allerdale Hall, safe with her. Instead of another ghost, she would create another life from all the death that had come before.

 

But first she would write it all down. Finish the story as its two doomed protagonists could not. And then...then she would look only forward.

 

***

 

_Ghosts are real. That much I know._

_There are things that tie them to a place, very much like they do to us. Some remain tied to a bunch of land, a time and date, a spilling of blood, a terrible crime._

_But there are others--others that hold onto an emotion. Grief, loss, revenge, or love._

_Those, they never go away_.

**Author's Note:**

> The final italicized section is a direct quotation from the end of the film.


End file.
